Tuesday, August 23, 2011

The White House calls this a clarification. If it was anyone other than Biden I would laugh, but with him it may be plausible. A policy in which the government dictates how many children a family can have and enforces it with forced sterilization and forced abortions is not one in which there should be any inkling of support for from our government.

"What we ended up doing is setting up a system whereby we did cut by $1.2 trillion upfront, the deficit over the next 10 years. And we set up a group of senators that have to come up with another $1.2 to $1.7 trillion in savings or automatically there will be cuts that go into effect in January to get those savings. So the savings will be accomplished. But as I was talking to some of your leaders, you share a similar concern here in China. You have no safety net. Your policy has been one which I fully understand -- I’m not second-guessing -- of one child per family. The result being that you’re in a position where one wage earner will be taking care of four retired people. Not sustainable.

So hopefully we can act in a way on a problem that's much less severe than yours, and maybe we can learn together from how we can do that."

"As I mentioned in my previous post, I contacted the White House this afternoon for an explanation of Vice President Biden's stunning remarks regarding China's odious one-child policy. Moments ago, I received the following on-the-record statement from Biden's press secretary, Kendra Barkoff:

“The Obama Administration strongly opposes all aspects of China’s coercive birth limitation policies, including forced abortion and sterilization. The Vice President believes such practices are repugnant. He also pointed out, in China, that the policy is, as a practical matter, unsustainable. He was arguing against the One Child Policy to a Chinese audience.”

This blanket condemnation of China's monstrous policy is laudable. Although millions of Americans harbor passionate disagreements with this administration's stance on abortion, every American should welcome the White House's clear and categorical rejection of "all aspects" of China's reproductive coercion. That being said, I still fail to see how publicly and proactively declining to "second guess" a policy that one finds "repugnant" amounts to "arguing against" it. If the Vice President's conviction is that China's policy is morally abhorrent, he should have said so when he raised the issue on Chinese soil. His thoughts on this question shouldn't require clarification, frankly, although the clarification is certainly appreciated."